"Blood is on the Square"

Marija just sent this to me:



Actually, if you listen to the song, it's not just pretty and romantic, it is also wrong: "blood can be washed away". Did you know that the brave Mothers of Tiananmen, fighting for so long for the right to lay red and white roses where their children died, accepted compensation from the Communist Party and have now laid their cause to rest? They said they were getting old and tired and needed to be pragmatic about it.

I can accept their point but it's something that had to be done and they should have been the ones to spearhead it. There has to be some official acknowledgment that this actually happened. It didn't, you realise, as the history books now stand, and what makes it so WRONG is that China gets into such a flap whenever Japanese children's school history books try to whitewash The Nanching Massacre by calling it The Nanjing Incident.

Can't have it both ways, Communist Party of China. If you demand others tell the truth you must also tell the truth. As my dad used to say "The man who makes the rules must be the first to keep the rules."

I should find my letters about the Mothers. They used to come to HK annually to mourn their lost children and we used to have a candle-light vigil to support them. And the reason they came so far was to take advantage of HK's Freedom of Assembly because China wouldn't let them mourn there because "it never happened."

Guess we'll have to continue the vigil without them, although it won't be the same. Pragmatism, huh!